9 Classic Cocktail Recipes to Memorize

In an age of artistinal bitters and small-batch gins, when hundreds of new drinks are finding their way onto menus, there's good reason why we keep coming back to the classics: manhattans, old-fashioneds, martinis, and negronis. These are the drinks on which so many others are based, primarily because their tried-and-true recipes have pleased generations (in some cases, a century or more) of discerning drinkers. We rounded up our favorite classic cocktails, and asked the experts to weigh in on how they've updated classics without reinventing the wheel.